[p2p-research] gotta read this

Mon Oct 5 16:30:28 CEST 2009

Michel,

I tend to agree that the Nordic nations live the best and have the best
systems for their nations.  Their problems and responsibilities were and are
relatively small, on the other hand.  Norway sits on a lake of oil.  Sweden
on a bed of copper and iron.  Finland has endless trees and fresh water.
Denmark impresses me most...they've had to fight off wars, etc. and their
only real asset was a good set of ports.  They've made the most of that.
Still in all, prior to 1900 the poorest places in the developed world were
in Scandanavia.

If I had to pick the most moral nation that has done the most with the least
under the worst circumstances, I'd go with Costa Rica.  I have great
admiration for Canada.  If I weren't an American, I'd want to be a
Canadian.  They are very different from us, and in many respects, better.
If I weren't Canadian, I'd want to be French.  I love the food, the
language, the attitude, the style and, especially, the wine and the beauty
of the place.  Dordogne specifically.

All in all, Americans are a little sensitive to criticism.  This is
particularly true because I think most Americans (especially intellectuals)
see Europeans as typically haughty and self-righteous where America is
concerned.  Europeans have long snickered when the US stumbles (or at least
that's the way lots of Americans see it.)  This usually leads to some right
wing group sending round pictures of all the crosses on graves in the 10s of
European cemeteries with US names on them.  Feelings are easily hurt on both
sides.  I love Europe.  I find it clean, smart, progressive and a wonderful
way of life.  Frankly after about 2 weeks of it, I am very homesick for ugly
and foolish politics, junk food, outrageous entertainment, and kooky ethnic
neighborhoods and cultural streams that break up the homogeneity I feel when
I am in Europe.  It is good for everyone to love a place and commit to it.
As an American abroad, I am perhaps overly sentimental.  I also know your
Asia very little.  I have known and loved Thai friends and have Chinese
family, but Asia is the biggest mystery to me.  My favorite aesthetic is the
Nara Japanese style of living.  My approval is ignorant however.  I have not
witnessed it firsthand and I do not know the history and details like I know
about the history of Jazz or baseball or the rise of various US college
systems.

I disagree with Edward about the variety of the US, but I agree with his
point on the homogeneity of our retail businesses...not good.

Americans are expected to not be nationalistic because of our central role,
but we are nationalists, culturalists and egoists...I suppose like most.

Humans aren't perfect.  My time in the trenches in politics as taught me a
few truisms:

1. Openness and transparency is best.  I'd even opt for radical
transparency.
2. Show me someone willing to invest their own blood and wealth in someone
else's security and happiness and I'll show you someone I trust as a person
or a nation
3. Conflict and debate is essential for progress
4. Things have layers.  Complexity is often present but misunderstood.
5. Idealism is almost always more dangerous than helpful.
6. The best solutions have very very long incubation times.  The real heros
are those who tinker and keep trying to perfect the future.
7. It is always about education.  Nothing else comes close.  Get education
right (I think the Finnish are the world leaders) and you will excel.  Get
it wrong, and you are doomed.  The US doesn't have it right in K-12, for the
most part.  Progress is being made.

Cheers,

Ryan

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 1:58 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I was not implying that Europe was much better .. though I would gather
> that some scandinavian countries are ahead of the game. Most foreign aid
> comes with strings attached, i.e. obligations to buy goods and services from
> the donor country.
>
> You are right of course about the tradition of private charitable giving in
> the US, which is quite strong, and likely stronger than in most european
> countries ..
>
> Michel
>
>   On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Edward Miller <embraceunity at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Quantitatively speaking, since the US is the largest national economy, it
>> shouldn't be surprising that the US also provides the greatest foreign aid
>> contributions.
>>
>> Qualitatively, the US government doesn't give away as big of a percentage
>> of their GDP as other governments. However, the government, in effect,
>> subsidizes public charity by making it tax deductible. The US's private
>> contributions should put the US on comparable footing to other nations in
>> foreign aid. The Europeans give about 1% of GDP, from what I have seen. I
>> actually think the idea that Europeans are oh so compassionate and
>> cosmopolitan is a sort of myth-making as well... not that these are even
>> good measures of compassion.
>>
>> There are at least two dark sides to this. First, foreign aid distributed
>> by the government is often little more than bribery to corrupt dictators.
>> This was especially true during the Cold War.
>>
>> Second, foreign aid from the private sector is often given with religious
>> fundamentalist strings attached. Want some bibles with your soup, little
>> african boy? Haha, just kidding, you don't have a choice in the matter. The
>> fact that this stuff is subsidized by the tax system is not, in my mind,
>> necessarily a good thing.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:44 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> thanks to Ryan, Paul, and Edward, I have read your contributions with
>>> great interest ...
>>>
>>> As a european I'm only piqued by the claim that the US gives most foreign
>>> aid ... it's actually one of the lowest (relatively speaking) of the western
>>> world ... I'll have to look it up though
>>>
>>> and the other thing, that the US pioneered the social welfare net? hmmm
>>> we had paid holidays since the thirties in france ... again, I want to check
>>> that, seems like US myth-making of being the best in the world ..<g>
>>>
>>>
>>> Michel
>>>
>>>   On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Edward Miller <embraceunity at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Michel,
>>>>
>>>> While I would agree with Ryan's general take on the matter, namely, his
>>>> disappointment with the apparent schizophrenia of the US, which has been the
>>>> primary driver for technological, social, and economic innovation for most
>>>> of the past century. However, I do have some differences other certain
>>>> points.
>>>>
>>>> First, I would disagree that the US is different on a state-by-state
>>>> basis. The world is a much smaller place because of communications
>>>> technology and in my extensive travels around the US, including such out of
>>>> the way places as Alaska, the striking thing I have noticed is the
>>>> homogeneity of our daily life. The cultural differences are mainly
>>>> superficial. Alaska might use snowmobiles to use McDonald's drive thru, but
>>>> that isn't exactly a qualitative change. We Americanize everything. We have
>>>> Taco Bell and Panda Express and the Washington Redskins, but they all use
>>>> the same models that Ray Kroc developed 50 years ago.
>>>>
>>>> I think the core-periphery model applies very well to the US in the
>>>> sense that the rich and the poor, the "liberal" and the "conservative," tend
>>>> to be diffuse and often in very close proximity to each other in a scattered
>>>> sort of way. If you look at detailed electoral maps and income maps of the
>>>> US, the variation is striking. Hyde Park, where Obama is from, and where the
>>>> University of Chicago is located (the institution which claims more Nobel
>>>> Laureates than any other in the world), is just blocks away from Englewood,
>>>> famous for having higher murder rates than Iraq.
>>>>
>>>> Another piece of the puzzle is cyberbalkanization, a term coined by one
>>>> of Obama's most hated (read: best) "czars," is to blame for much of it. Even
>>>> Glenn Beck commented on this, though without using the term. Because of the
>>>> exponential increase in media outlets and discussion groups, including this
>>>> one, there are now thousands of mini echo chambers each talking past one
>>>> another and becoming further and further estranged from one another. We pick
>>>> and choose exactly which sources we want to view, and filter out anything we
>>>> don't wish to see.... with RSS and tagging we can even filter out stuff from
>>>> within our preferred sources. One of the effects is all the loony conspiracy
>>>> theories now gaining traction. Yet the geographical locations of each of
>>>> these cyberbalkanized groups look about the same as those electoral maps,
>>>> income maps, etc. They are diffuse.
>>>>
>>>> I notice after watching extended amounts of MSNBC, CNN, and FOX that I
>>>> become terrified of the sorts of things which David Michael Green is talking
>>>> about. However, this week I haven't watched television at all and merely
>>>> used my narrow online media sources and RSS feeds, and my attitude is
>>>> entirely changed. I no longer feel an urgent desire to stock up on guns at
>>>> least.In fact, my thoughts on a lot of these types of things have been all
>>>> over the map lately, and while I wouldn't want to project this onto my
>>>> fellow countrymen, I do tend to think this is part of our current zeitgeist,
>>>> or collective consciousness, or what have you. We are at the brink of deep
>>>> structural change.
>>>>
>>>> Yet, one fact which remains is the astonishingly low amount of political
>>>> interest and participation on the part of the general public, and it seems
>>>> the political hysteria may in fact be only in intellectual circles. Voting
>>>> rates are very low. While cable news generally gets a couple million viewers
>>>> per night in total, our nation's population is close to 300 million. We are
>>>> very distracted and deluged by media, video games, facebook quizzes,
>>>> twittering, texting, and such.
>>>>
>>>> Of course this is both a natural flaw of human beings and a creation of
>>>> our educational system which, as The Big Crunch article which Paul linked to
>>>> argues, is structured to polish the "gems" and discard the vast majority of
>>>> the "dirt."  It is a good example of one of the many tipping points which
>>>> are happening simultaneously, along with structural unemployment, the
>>>> unenforceability of intellectual property, skyrocketing healthcare costs,
>>>> Open Source, etc etc etc. In systems-theoretic terms, we are at the cusp of
>>>> bifurcation.
>>>>
>>>> It seems that the 2 Party System, unless some truly outstanding
>>>> Republican figures arise, will simply have to crumble, and we may end up as
>>>> a single-party system or multi-party, but this is the least of the changes
>>>> which will be occurring simultaneously.
>>>>
>>>> I think the educational system described by the Big Crunch paper
>>>> explains a lot about why the US is where it is, and since an informed
>>>> electorate is the most crucial aspect of any functioning democracy, we are
>>>> going to be in big trouble if we can't come up with a radically new
>>>> educational paradigm.  Intellectual self-defense is the most crucial skill
>>>> in the age of cyberbalkanization. We need critical, reflexive people to make
>>>> informed decisions as citizens, consumers, and entrepreneurs.
>>>>
>>>> My generation, the Millenials, were raised in those strange years
>>>> between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 when our nation was completely
>>>> unmatched on every possible measure, and there appeared to be absolutely no
>>>> existential threats. Politics consisted of endless play-by-play coverage of
>>>> the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Yet, my generation was also forced into
>>>> political awareness with the shock of 9/11. Relatively speaking, we have a
>>>> keen social consciousness according to most statistics (volunteerism, public
>>>> service, etc), and were the first generation to grow up with computers.
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps there is some hope in this generation, and the growing
>>>> alternatives to both markets and governments, as embodied by the P2P
>>>> movement. Perhaps the paradigm shift to this will be as bloodless as the
>>>> overthrow of Encyclopedia Britannica by Wikipedia. Not too many molotovs in
>>>> that revolution, from what I hear.
>>>>
>>>> Yet, it isn't inconceivable that the nation could fracture or collapse,
>>>> but considering the statistics, I can't imagine many geographical borders
>>>> larger than a few square blocks that would contain homogenous
>>>> cultural/political/social views. I really think what we are seeing will be
>>>> unprecedented, and likely very strange.
>>>>
>>>> If Factor e Farm or something similar takes off, perhaps Panarchy will
>>>> take off, as they seem to be hoping. Though I doubt it could remain an
>>>> evolutionarily stable state for long. Natural Selection will continue to
>>>> select for virulent systems and actually think Alexander Wendt's recent work
>>>> arguing that World Government is inevitable makes a strong point... or at
>>>> least elucidates the structural properties which make higher levels of
>>>> organization likely (and even desirable).
>>>>
>>>> The EU seems like it may be closer to adopting the Lisbon Treaty, but
>>>> even this model isn't really the future we seem to be heading toward. We
>>>> will likely see more distributed non-state actors, global guerillas, open
>>>> source revolutionaries, resilient communities, and so forth, but they will
>>>> also almost certainly form transnational coalitions to create mutually
>>>> agreed upon organizational apparatuses and alliances at both regional and
>>>> global levels.
>>>>
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>>> --
>>> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>>> Research: http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
>>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>>
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>>
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>
>
> --
> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
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